My comic, Sunnyville Stories

March 14, 2011 — maxwest

Some of you may know and some may not. Besides this free blog on WordPress.com, I have a self-hosted blog powered by WordPress.org that serves as my main base of operations. It’s dedicated to an independent comics series of mine and it’s titled Sunnyville Stories. That blog is meant to discuss that work while this one is intended primarily as a showcase for my other works in pen-and-ink like my landscapes and pin-up girls. However, I’ll briefly tell some of you readers out there about my magnum opus.

Sunnyville Stories is a slice-of-life comic that revolves around a small remote hamlet called Sunnyville. This town is inhabited by anthropomorphic animals who dress traditionally – males wear suits and females wear skirts and dresses. The story consists of individual self-contained vignettes (called “episodes”) which deal with the everyday adventures of two main characters – Rusty Duncan, a teenage cat moved into Sunnyville from a big city, and Samantha “Sam” Macgregor, a country girl who’s lived in Sunnyville all her life.

Sunnyville was partly based on my own personal experiences of moving from Queens, New York to the remote southern USA. The primary inspiration for the series however was a 1986 anime series called Maple Town Monogatari or as it was called in the USA, Maple Town: My Favorite Place to Be. The look and feel of my comic was strongly influenced by Maple Town. In fact, I discussed it in one of my blog posts so go ahead and check that out.

At the time of this writing, the series has had three complete stories finished. A fourth one is being inked right now and the script for the fifth story has been completed. The very first episode of Sunnyville, titled “Beginnings”, is available for free to read. The second episode “Multiball Madness” and the third episode “the Train Robbers” are available for purchase over on Indy Planet along with the first volume of the Sunnyville Sketchbook. I hope to have a trade paperback of this comic out by the start of 2012.

Since Sunnyville has its own blog, I won’t talk much about it here. Go check out the blog for it if you’re interested. That gets updated twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday. This blog is for my other stuff and tomorrow there’ll be more updates with my pin-up squirrel girl, CG. So don’t forget to subscribe via RSS or email if you haven’t already?

What’s your opinion? Do any of you draw comics too? I’d like to know so leave a comment or two.